Death Scene Page 20
‘So what have we got?’ Mickey asked Sergeant Finlayson, a man he’d known almost since the start of his career.
‘Sweet Fanny Adams. Place has been cleared out. No stock, no paperwork. Though it looks as though the family left in a hurry. Upstairs looks like the Mary Celeste.’
‘So Grieves focused on getting his business away.’ Mickey glanced around. He nodded in friendly fashion at the fingerprint officer working his way along the counter and then looked more closely at the absence of prints. ‘It’s been wiped down,’ Mickey said, astonished.
‘Not just the counter, most of the shop.’
‘Now, there’s a thing. By Grieves or by someone that came after, I wonder?’ He turned to Finlayson. ‘All right to go upstairs?’
Finlayson nodded that it was and Mickey took himself off to poke around.
Outside the shop, door-to-door enquiries were under way and photographs of Cissie Rowe and Philippe Boilieu shown around. So far those of Philippe had drawn a blank but several people recalled Cissie. Well dressed compared to most of the local population and seemingly out of place, she had attracted notice.
And so had a blue car. Once it had dropped her off and left and a second time it had waited for her to return, much to the delight of the local children – and the annoyance of the driver.
Mickey, having asked that any such information should be immediately relayed to him, was interrupted in his reverie by a very eager young constable.
‘I asked if the driver was a chauffeur,’ he added. ‘The lady said not. Said the kids were tormenting him and he got out of the car to chase them off. He was dressed like a gent, not a driver.’
Mickey felt in his pocket for the photograph of Geoffrey Clifton and followed the constable back to his informant, aware that the press corps turned eagerly in his direction as the constable led him down the street.
Mickey heard his name being called.
‘Sergeant Hitchens! There been a murder, then?’
‘Sergeant Hitchens! What brings you down here, then?’
Mickey waved vaguely but did not respond.
‘This is the lady, sir,’ the constable told him.
Mickey nodded. The informant was a young woman with a baby on her hip and another clinging to her leg. Mickey smiled at her in what he hoped was an encouraging manner. ‘I understand you’ve seen the young lady in my picture,’ he said, ‘and also seen her in a blue car.’
She nodded, warily. ‘I told the constable,’ she said. She was clearly aware of the scrutiny of her neighbours and discomforted by it. ‘She weren’t from round here. If she’d been local, I’d have said nothin’,’ she asserted, far more loudly than a reply intended purely for Mickey’s benefit.
‘I’m sure you’d not grass on your neighbours, my dear,’ Mickey told her. ‘But this was a stranger, yes?’
There was momentary confusion in the woman’s eyes. ‘She came here, time to time, to the pawn shop. She’s not the only toff that did. Some of them, they’d turn up in a cab, have it wait outside while they kept their heads down and shuffled in. Like they was better than the rest of us. They still got themselves into trouble and had to pawn summat, didn’t they?’
‘And this lady?’
‘She weren’t like that. That’s why I noticed her at first, I suppose. She just walked up the street with her head high like she didn’t care. In she went, did her business, out she came again.’
‘And how many times did she arrive in the car?’
‘Twice that I know about. Big car with a horse on the front. One time he just left her, the second time he waited and they drove off together.’
‘And that was the time the driver got out and chased the boys off?’
‘They were putting their grubby little mitts all over his paintwork and he lost his rag with them. Got out and shouted. I thought he’d be chasing them down the street but she came back out the shop and they took off.’
Mickey fished the photograph of Geoffrey Clifton out of his pocket and showed it to her. She peered at it and then nodded. ‘That’s the car – and that’ – she prodded at the photograph – ‘that’s who were driving it.’
Mickey thanked her.
‘I know who she is,’ she said proudly. ‘The young lady. I recognized her straight off. She’s that Cissie Rowe, isn’t she? Lovely, she is.’
Mickey smiled but made no further comment.
He could guess the pattern of things to come. The press would ask what questions Mickey had put and she would tell them, in detail. The connection between the raid on the pawnbroker’s and Cissie Rowe would be made and the press, once they had sunk their teeth into the facts, would feel free to chew them over and spit out whatever gobs of narrative they deemed would sell the most papers.
Mickey sighed and then turned back towards the pawnbroker’s. He was starting to think like Henry, as he had previously reminded his boss. They and their colleagues fed the beast when it suited them and hunted it down when it ceased to be complimentary. Such was the nature of things.
He wondered how his informant would feel when someone told her that Cissie Rowe was dead; it was evident from her comments that she had no idea.
Upstairs in the pawnbroker’s shop, Mickey resumed his inspection. Clothes still hung in wardrobes, children’s toys sat on shelves. There was some indication – empty spaces on rails and in drawers – that they had packed a few of their possessions but this was utterly different from the way that the shop had been so thoroughly cleared.
‘How many lived here?’
‘Ted Grieves, his wife, three children. And the mother-in-law used to stay at times. She slept in the kiddies’ room.’
Two bedrooms, a living room cum kitchen. Toilet in the yard and a pot beneath the bed in case it was needed in the night – one that had not been emptied when the family had left.
It stank, Mickey thought, but the rest of the flat was relatively clean.
So, he thought, perhaps the family was sent away ahead of the shop being cleared, told by the father to pack for just a few days, so as not to arouse suspicion. They left in something of a hurry, Mickey guessed – and from the state of the pot probably at night or early in the morning.
‘Did Grieves have any employees?’
‘A boy who helped out with this and that. The wife, and sometimes the mother-in-law, helped to look after the shop.’
‘And the boy is …?’
‘At his mother’s place in Edmonton. Seems he was sent on an errand that took him across town. He got back after midnight that same day to find that his boss had gone. He tells us that when he woke that morning the missus and kids had already left.’
‘Woke? He slept on the premises?’
‘Mattress behind the counter. Mrs Grieves fed him but he didn’t eat with the family, and he slept in the shop.’
Mickey nodded. ‘So the family left in the night while the boy slept. He was then sent off on a fool’s errand and Grieves cleared the shop. Did no one notice this? I doubt he could have done this alone.’
‘We have reports of a van pulled up to the yard gates, but no one took much notice. The boy left at eleven in the morning; the van was spotted late afternoon. The shop had been closed all day and a note put on the door about a family bereavement. Grieves had it put about that there’d been a death in the wife’s family.’
‘To provide an excuse for them going away.’ Mickey nodded. ‘That figures. So the family left, the boy was sent away, Grieves and at least one other – someone had to be driving the van – packed the place up and scarpered. Likely they brought the van round at the last minute so as not to draw attention. I’d bet a day’s pay that we’ll find it was parked up close by all day somewhere handy. Another van parked up by the market would have been ignored.’
Finlayson jerked his head in agreement. ‘Question is where they went, and why. The why we can guess. Local rumour has it that he’d upset Bailey one time too often.’
‘And does local rumour give a particula
r reason?’
‘Consensus is that it was the usual reason. Grieves was skimming a bit too much off the top.’
‘So, how much use did Bailey make of Grieves? Do you have a nose for that?’
‘My nose is telling me that Bailey used the business to regularize stolen goods. Grieves issues a pawn ticket for an item, the item disappears into the shop. A buyer is found, redeems the ticket, Grieves takes his cut. The amount changing hands on redemption bears no resemblance to the figure written on the ticket as having been advanced.’
‘My nose tells me that yours is probably right,’ Mickey said. On the tickets he had seen, the price advanced for a gold brooch and a locket with chain had seemed laughably slight. He frowned. ‘Though from what we’ve seen our end the items Miss Rowe brought up here were trinkets. Certainly not worth the time of someone like Bailey.’
‘So maybe Bailey didn’t know abut these little transactions. What’s not worthwhile for the likes of Bailey might represent a nice little earner for someone lower down in the pecking order.’
That chimed with Mickey’s thinking and with what he’d discussed with Henry earlier and it was good to hear the same views coming from another mouth.
Which left the same question, Mickey thought. Was Bailey aware of these side deals, these little transactions, or was he kept in ignorance of them?
If that last were true, Mickey thought, then he didn’t give much for the chances of the individual who’d gone behind his back. The monetary amounts might have been small but Bailey was not a man who felt he should be missing out. If all you had was a sixpence, Bailey would feel himself entitled to tuppence of it.
As he came back on to the street he noted the press men now gathered around the young woman’s door. He glanced at his watch, reflecting that they would be getting close to the six o’clock deadline when the day’s copy must be filed.
Let’s see what they make of all this, he thought.
TWENTY-THREE
It was almost twenty-four hours since Mickey had broken off his interrogation of Philippe Boilieu. He had, Mickey was told, been interrogated twice more but was refusing to speak to anyone but Sergeant Hitchens.
Mickey had spoken to Henry and detailed the day’s events, warning him that the morning papers might be about to launch their Shoreham murder into the stratosphere. Henry had sounded better and Mickey was reassured that his boss would soon be on his feet.
He had Philippe brought up from his cell and into the interview room they had used before. Philippe looked wearier and more haggard, the hair now sweaty and matted and hanging loose around his face.
‘I’m told you’re ready to talk,’ Mickey said. ‘So sit yourself down and let’s be having it. I’ve had a long day and my patience is wearing a little thin, if you get my meaning.’
Philippe sat. ‘I have no wish to go back to prison,’ he said.
‘Well, I’m sorry, my lad, but that’s exactly where you’ll be going. The items we found in your rooms will make certain of that. I’m guessing you don’t want a murder charge added to what’s already lined up so, if I was you, I’d open my mouth and let the words come out.’
‘I didn’t kill her,’ Philippe said tightly. ‘I would never have hurt her. Never.’
‘Even though she rejected you.’
‘I would never have hurt her.’
‘So, tell me. What went on between the two of you? You said you argued. What was that about, then?’
Philippe leaned back in the uncomfortable wooden chair and rubbed at his eyes. ‘I followed her back to her bungalow. This was two days before she died and she had left me alone, in the café. She was angry and I thought … I thought that even if she no longer wanted me we should not part on such bad terms. Our families were gone. We were all that was left. So I followed her.’
‘Back up a bit, my lad. You were angry with her because of what she had become, you said before. What exactly did you mean by that? What had she been telling you?’
The younger man shook his head. ‘She confessed to me that sometimes she earned a little money by transporting certain items up to town. I think … I think she told me this because I admitted to her that I had not always earned my money honestly. That sometimes, to survive, I had stolen, I had deceived. I had made those films. Though I confess, in the end I did not tell her about the films.’
‘No? But you were going to, weren’t you? Going to suggest to her that it was a way of earning good money, despite the fact that it would have ruined her in the end.’
‘And in the end I couldn’t do it. I looked at Cécile and I remembered. We had grown up together, loved one another. Promised—’ He broke off, and gestured that this was not something he wished to talk about.
Mickey had no intention of letting him off the hook. ‘But the intent was there, wasn’t it, boy? You’d have sold her in a heartbeat, this one time love of yours. You looked at Cissie Rowe and you could see the money rolling in.’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘No? Well, we’ll let that pass for a while. So she told you she’d been transporting small items up to London. On whose behalf? Did she tell you that?’
Philippe shook his head. ‘She told me nothing. Only that one thing.’
‘And did she tell you what she was taking?’
‘Jewellery, she said. She took it to a pawn shop and got a ticket and a little cash. She waited until a message came and then she would take the ticket to the post and send it to the address she had been given.’
‘And the address. Did she tell you what it was?’
‘No. I did not ask. I was appalled. I did not expect that Cécile would become involved in such matters. For me, it was a matter of no choice, but for Cécile …’
‘Choices are something I suspect many women are short on,’ Mickey said heavily. ‘And you’re telling me you’d put this one on some sort of pedestal. You tell me that, and yet you wanted her for your so-called speciality films. For your pornography.’
‘I don’t make pornography.’
‘No? Tell that to the judge. And was that all she told you?’
Philippe shrugged and Mickey knew there was more but that he’d have to winkle it out. ‘And so you followed her. And what happened then?’
‘She walked back along the footbridge. She was across the bridge before I reached it. I could see her stepping off when I reached the Dolphin Hard at the town end. I followed, but she was at her bungalow before I had crossed the bridge.’
Mickey nodded encouragingly. The Dolphin Hard, he recalled, was the slipway close to the bridge from which the ferry was launched. ‘And you went straight to her bungalow.’
‘And she was inside. I opened the door and went in. She did not hear me at first. She had told me that day that she had just returned from London.’
‘Two days before she died,’ Mickey confirmed.
‘Yes, two days. She was in her bedroom, emptying her handbag on to the bed. I said to her, “What is that, Cécile?” And she turned around to face me and I have never seen so much fury in any woman’s eyes.’
‘And why was she so angry? Because you had followed her?’
‘No.’ Philippe shook his head. ‘I think it was because of what I had seen her taking from her bag.’
‘And what was that?’
‘Paper wrappings, like you might get from a pharmacy. The kind you might find wrapping a sleeping draft or a vermifuge. But I don’t think these papers contained either of those things.’
Mickey recalled the paper wrapping on the bedside table. The one that had contained cocaine.
‘I have never taken drugs,’ Philippe said. ‘I drink a little wine, and since I have come to England I have even learned to drink the English beer, but I do not have anything to do with narcotics. Cécile always knew how I felt about such things.’
‘Nice to know you have some boundaries.’ Mickey’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. ‘Go on,’ he said, relenting a little. ‘Tell me what happened next.’
‘So, she was shouting at you?’
‘Screaming at me. I tried to calm her, to say she should lower her voice, that the neighbours might hear. And I was right, Sergeant Hitchens. One of them did hear.’
‘Ah,’ Mickey said. ‘And who might that have been?’
‘I don’t know. She didn’t say and neither did he. He suddenly appeared in the main room and called out to see if everything was all right. “Cissie,” he called. “Cissie, I heard you arguing with someone. I thought I’d come and see if everything was all right.”’
‘And how did she respond?’
‘She was still angry. She called out to him that everything was fine and that I was just leaving. He came closer, near to the bedroom door, and she pushed me out and closed it behind her. She was angry with me and I think angry with him for coming in. I supposed she might have been embarrassed.’
‘Just angry? Nothing more?’
Philippe looked puzzled. ‘What more?’ he asked.
‘And you left then? And this neighbour, what did he do?’
‘How should I know? I left, I stormed away. I didn’t look back. Then … then I heard that she had died. That she had been killed, and I knew that this must have happened because of what she had become. I warned her. I told her that nothing good could come of being mixed up in such things and, believe me, Sergeant Hitchens, I should know. Nothing good has come to me.’
‘Apart from money,’ Mickey countered.
‘You saw how I live? Not even so much of that.’
Mickey asked a few more questions but Philippe seemed drained now that he had said his piece and Mickey had him escorted back to his cell.
He called Henry, even though it was very late.
‘And so,’ Henry Johnstone said, ‘we see if Cissie Rowe, or Cécile Rolland, was registered as a user with any of the approved physicians in London. We find out whether she had her prescription filled in the days before she died.’
‘Sounds to me as though her physician might have over-prescribed,’ Mickey observed.